Sam’s Club Is Making a Big Change to Its Products

There’s no denying that customers are more and more in tune with what ingredients are in the products they’re purchasing. In fact, Sam’s Club asked its community of members, and 72 percent responded that they are “actively seeking” foods that are minimally processed. 

So, the warehouse store is on a mission to give its customers what they’re asking for by reevaluating the ingredients used in its private label products. 

As the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) is pressuring companies to ban synthetic food dyes, like Citrus Red No. 2, Orange B, and Red No. 40, as well as attempting to speed up the timeline to phase out previously banned Red Dye No. 3 from all products, Sam’s Club has announced that it is removing more than 40 ingredients from its products.

Sam’s Club Announces Plans To Remove 40 Ingredients From Products

In 2022, Sam’s Club announced 11 goals for keeping “members” and the “planet” in mind that it hoped to achieve by 2025. One of those goals was its “Made Without” initiative, which states, “We aspire for 100% of our products to be free from ingredients on our ‘made without’ list by 2025.”

On June 5, the company reported that 96 percent of its Member’s Mark products meet the “made without” goals. Its “made without” list contains dozens of ingredients that Sam’s Club plans to remove or replace, including artificial flavors, aspartame, high fructose corn syrup, and certified synthetic colors and FD&C colors. 

Sam’s Club isn’t the first store to invoke this initiative for its private label products. Both Aldi and Trader Joe’s have banned ingredients in the past for private label products, including artificial flavors and dyes, monosodium glutamate (MSG), and genetically modified ingredients (GMOs).

As Sam’s continues to simplify its Member’s Mark ingredients list, the store is highlighting a “first-to-market” product that stands out in its “Made Without” lineup: the Member’s Mark Star Cutout Cookies, which it released this summer. The cookies were red, white, and blue and dyed with vegetable juice, annatto extract, and spirulina extract rather than synthetic food dyes.

Those, and more natural food dyes, can be found in a slew of Sam’s Member’s Mark products, which it highlights on its site in the “Made Without” category.

On a recent visit to Sam’s Club’s HQ, the brand told Allrecipes that any new product hitting shelves for the remainder of the year will not use any of its banned ingredients. Additionally, the club store has been hard at work reformulating former fan-loved products—like the Member’s Mark Peppermint Almonds—to follow its made without guidelines. So, if there were products you thought were discontinued because they were pulled from shelves or didn’t return last year, it might be because Sam’s was working on a cleaner ingredient list.

It’s not clear which products don’t fall into Sam’s “Made Without” category just yet, but hopefully, by the end of 2025, they all will.